Are American Soldiers Heroes?

"Get jailed, jump bail,
Join the Army if you fail"
--Subterranean Homesick Blues/Bob Dylan

"We went to war; America went to the mall."
--American Army ditty

At the end of the Band of Brothers episode "The Last Patrol," David Webster voice overs a paragraph about how the end of the Second World War was in sight and while American soldiers were still dying in towns like Haguena on the German border, back in America night clubs and casino's were packed and you couldn't get a hotel room at most resorts. Even in that war, when the entire population was mobilized or at risk for mobilization only a small number of men were actually at the tip of the spear, on the front lines. "Nobody back home would ever know what those men sacrificed," Webster says.

So, in modern times, as long as America fights its wars abroad, there will likely be a disconnect between the price paid by a small number of warriors and that paid by the civilian population.

The refrain "they fight to keep us free," is a little shopworn, even after 9/11. After all, no terrorist attack has ever actually threatened our freedom, unless you count the freedom to hop a jet to Florida during the winter. They fight to keep us safe might be more like it, but it's not at all clear any of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Niger or Syria have done that.

America went to the "volunteer" army, to "professionalize" military service after Vietnam, mostly because politicians realized if you drafted boys out of families and sent them into harm's way more or less against their will, you'd better be able to sell that to their parents, and truth is, we haven't had a war since where you could sell the idea to Congress, much less to parents.

So, who does "volunteer?" Are our armed forces comprised of young men and women who are motivated by love of country, eager to defend our freedoms or are they simply young people who have looked around at the available options and concluded the best deal for them, economically, financially, socially is to join the military?

"Hillbilly Elegy" details the dysfunctional Appalachian family and communities from which J.D. Vance fled to the Army. One of the most pathetic scenes in the book is at Chili's restaurant, where Vance, returning home on leave, has enough money to buy his grandparents and sibling dinner. It was the proudest moment in his life. He felt like a man.

Not everyone in the Army was from as desperate circumstances as J.D. Vance. Pat Tillman was a millionaire professional football player who joined the Army after 9/11 and then died in a firefight in Afghanistan, shot by mistake by his own compatriots, killed by friendly fire.

There are likely many reasons young people join:  some are from military families; some are disaffected by school; some dream of becoming heroes.

But they can all claim that most socially acceptable motive of all: Patriotism.

Whatever that may be. 

The armed forces have marketed service with huge flags unfurled at ball fields, action ads on TV, smart uniforms, support of TV shows and movies.  And at the end of every big scene is the line about how we are about to die for freedom and country.

I have never served in combat, so I cannot know, but I suspect if combat shares anything with the service I have seen in the emergency rooms and wards, when you are there, you have no grand illusions of valor. You are just trying to survive and you are trying to not embarrass yourself and you are trying to use your training to get a specific job done.

The fact is, our volunteer Army is a mercenary army. You may not like that word, "mercenary" with it's connotation of motivation devoid of ethics, based on money alone. A prostitute is mercenary. A wife loves her husband, but also benefits financially (if she's lucky.) Human motivation is seldom uni-dimensional. But the fact remains, as President Trump told the wife of a soldier killed in Niger, "He knew what he was signing up for," that was one of truest things President Heel Spurs ever said. 
For Trump, everything thing is financial, a negotiation for the best deal. These soldiers--they are just trying to get the best deal they can. Let's not muddy the waters with "patriotism."  Patriotism is for suckers.

Of course, there are people and times when you can't avoid patriotism. There is that wonderful scene in "Gone With the Wind," in which the most cynical and realistic character in the story, Rhett Butler, sees the old men and young boys who are marching out of Atlanta with rifles slung over their shoulders and he jumps down from the wagon and hands the reins to Scarlett O'Hara and she is outraged, "You can't just leave us to go fight some war!" And Butler tells her he knows it's ridiculous, but sometimes you just have to do something which is not in your own best interest.

We haven't had that sort of choice when it comes to military service in this country since the war against Hitler.

And there is a wonderful sequence in "Full Metal Jacket" where a camera crew interviews Marines on the way to  the fight for Hue, in Vietnam, and the reporter asks Animal Mother, the BAR man (who carries a very big gun) if he is fighting for freedom. "Freedom?" Animal Mother laughs. "You think I'd kill someone for freedom?"

Learning from Fox News

There's a scene in the movie "Patton" in which Patton looks down on a field of battle where his tank command routs the tank corp of the German General Rommel, and Patton calls out, "Take that, you bastard! I read your book!"

Patton studied Rommel's book to learn him better, so he could beat him.
Football coaches go over hours of film to learn the moves and the strengths of their opponents.

But Democrats do not study their adversaries, not nearly enough.

This morning, I watched as CNN interviewed Senators coming out of the Zuckerberg hearings. 
First, they interviewed a Democrat from Delaware, Sen. Coons, who was careful, articulate, qualifying every assertion with modifying phrases. He could have been testifying in court, his statements were so careful and well constructed and bullet proof. 
But then they caught a Republican senator from Louisiana, with the disorienting name of John Kennedy, and he shuffled his feet and said, "I'm giving away at least 75 IQ points to Mr. Zuckerberg, I know that, but he's a whip smart man, and I think he could go back to California and shoo those $1200 an hour lawyers from his office and say, 'I'm gonna write a new users' agreement that's not written in Swahili that most folks can understand, so they'll know how we're gonna use their information.' And he knows there's three things about the Internet and one of 'em is how it can poison elections, and I bet he can figure out how he can stop us from drinking that poison every time we boot up our computers. I sure hope he can, because if he can't we got much bigger problems than Mr. Zuckerberg."

They're on TV; they must know what they are talking about

What this Republican did in those few moments before the camera was amazing. First, the contrast between the short, nervous, bald Democrat, who was ever so careful and the tall, patrician but ever so folksy Republican, with a shock of white hair, carelessly flopping in his eyes was stark.
And then came the smooth flow of funny remarks we can laugh at and agree with--user contracts in Swahili--which appeals to his base back in Louisiana where they know Swahili's are Black and live in Africa and got no business on our computers here in the USA and anyway, nobody can understand all that legalese, which is what Senator Coons speaks and what is in those users agreements.

You can teach a girl to read the news; you can't teach pretty

We need smart, smooth, dumb like foxes Democrats like they got in the Republican party.

They are beating the stuffing out of us.

Okay, watch this or watch CNN?

The South had no factories, few armories, sparse infrastructure at the beginning of the Civil War, but they had better leaders, effective generals and they nearly won that war with leadership.

The Republican Party, which is basically a Southern party--a party which knits together those Alabama-in-between areas from Wisconsin to Montana to Pennsylvania--has been kicking the bejezzus out of Democrats with better generals for years now. 

You can stop channel surfing right now

If the Democrats hope to regain Congress, the courts and/or the Presidency, they will need to find somebody who has read the Fox News book.

That's a gun in her pants

Just watch Fox News: This morning some leggy blond in a dazzling red blouse interviewed a 22 year old coed from the University of Tennessee who had gone viral with her photo wearing a Women for Trump T shirt and a gun tucked in her waistband, pointed toward her crotch. 
The whole interview was eye candy. 
It was all about how coeds needed guns to protect themselves on campus, but the Democrats don't want anyone under 21 buying a gun and they don't want guns on campus. Well, Fox will have you know, Trump women aren't having any of it. 
Dream on that and eat your heart out.

Got girls? Get Conservative

Democrats should be watching Fox every day, figuring out how they succeed and thinking about how to counter that. 

And Trump Won

When they go low, we go high. And how did that work out for us?

Predictions from the Past of Present Day

Henry Louis Mencken was not the kind of guy I'd want to hang out with. Racist, anti Semitic, opposed to the New Deal, opposed to joining the fight against Hitler--he was about a lot of nasty white, comfortable American male things.

But he did have the capacity to observe the American scene with a ruthless eye and he was very quotable.

Here's one which seems particularly apt in 21st century America:

"On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

How did he know?

Victory in Virginia Day: A Stillness at Appomattox

April 9th is a day which we should celebrate as fervently as the Fourth of July.
Fireworks, marches, balloons, flags, lots of flags.
It was the day Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox.
The fighting did not entirely cease, but the remaining Confederate armies in the field were rendered ineffective and surrendered ineluctably.
A guerilla war in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, some of it led by Confederate generals like Bedford Forrest tried to undo the outcome, tried to win the war by other means.
Grant exerted every effort to thwart this hideous Klan.

American Swastika

The Civil War was, as James McPherson has described it, the Second American Revolution, the movement with finally freed all men (except, of course for "Native Americans") and Lincoln made sure the fighting was not undone by legal shenanigans and he got the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments passed as a condition of the Southern states being readmitted to the Union.
These amendments did not give the vote to women, but it was a beginning, a step toward universal enfranchisement and full citizenship.

Gentleman slaver.

Of course, the war began as a war to save the Union, but to save a union from what? From Southerners intent on protecting "States' Rights?" And what were these rights which were so cherished?The right to own and sell and rape slaves.

Relentless.

None of us today is as close to that epoch as Abraham Lincoln, and you have to allow him a certain amount of authority here. Looking back at the four years of war at his Second Inaugural a month before Appomattox, Lincoln gave a succinct and utterly persuasive history of the war.  He said that at the outset, nobody wanted to admit it was about slavery, but as the years wore on and as freed slaves made their presence felt, it became clear, the war had been about slavery all along. Union troops, marching through the South were often appalled and repulsed by the freed slaves who followed them, but, eventually, the presence of these slaves sunk in and the ordinary soldier could believe, in some part of his mind, his efforts were in fact heroic. War has a way of crushing any thoughts of heroism in the minds of those who fight it, and men fight for their fellow soldiers, but that experience of seeing overjoyed freed slaves had to affect even the most cynical.

Nobody even comes close.

In one of the greatest speeches ever uttered by anyone on this planet, and certainly by any American President, Lincoln said, as only he could say, what had happened.

"An impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war."

"I will make Georgia howl."

What really good writing is, after all, is an explication, in understandable terms, of the truth.

No American has ever been better at this than Lincoln.

Lee, who many, even today, in the South, regard as a fine gentleman who was too kindly to be a slaver, fought tooth and nail to protect slavery. He was not kind to his own slaves and his armies murdered white Union officers who led Negro regiments and slaughtered the soldiers after they had surrendered or captured them and returned them to slavery. He is buried with his horse in Lexington Virginia. He would have felt violated had slaves been buried nearby, but his horse, oh, that was most excellent. Think about that.

The United States of America is exceptional among nations in only one important way, as far as Mad Dog is concerned:  In the long and bloody history of this planet only one nation across the millennia has ever fought its most costly war, or any war for that matter, to free an underclass within its own body politic.

Protesting the removal of Lee's statue

Walk through our cemeteries here in Hampton, or Hampton Falls or anywhere in the Granite State, as far north as Gilmanton and Holderness and you see them there, men in their twenties, dead in 1861, 1862, 1863, 1864, 1865.  In the Holderness cemetery, the majority of graves from these years are fighting age men. There is a plaque there, and all over New Hampshire there are similar plaques, with the names of the dead soldiers who went South to fight. Nason Road in Hampton Falls is named after a man who raised a Union regiment.

What Lee fought for

Nobody should imagine all these men left town to free slaves. Each man likely had his own reasons. But we cannot be as cynical as Boris Pasternak, who said, no happy man leaves home to go to war. Men whose lives could have been long and often pleasurable went to fight.

Sheridan and his staff (Custer on right)

And  you know the men who joined the Massachusetts 54 th, the Negro regiment about whom the book and movie "Glory" was made went to fight for emancipation.

Falstaff looked at a rotting body on the battlefield and said, "There's glory for you."

Again, cynicism which is often and mostly true, but not entirely.

Grief and History. But not regret.

If this country ever had heroes, it was then:  Joshua Chamberlain who held the Union flank at Gettysburg, Phil Sheridan (whose wife famously said, "I would rather be Phil Sheridan's widow than any living man's wife") Sherman, and, of course, Grant.  And let us not forget the greatest hero of all: Abraham Lincoln.

If we are anything special, if the nations survives Trump, if it survives another 300 years, we will still be looking back to these citizens and wonder how God made such men.

Americans today, none of us were alive then. Because they were great, does not make us great. But their lives can inspire us and teach us. When we think of giving up, of not taking a stand when an aristocracy, a billionaire class tries to secure its own wealth and advantages by stomping on an underclass, we can ask ourselves: What would Lincoln do?

World Rape Record

If Donald Trump means anything, it's that he's made a whole cohort of ignorant people feel important, feel they have a seat at the table, feel like their voice and their opinions, however ill founded, matter.

You can see it on Fox News every morning: Dimwits who do not have enough RAM in their short term memory to capture data and to use "facts" in developing an argument are now on equal footing with all those smart boys and girls who can do all that.


The President has made the declarative sentence sufficient in and of itself. In speech, there is logic.


So that band of a thousand illegal immigrants from Honduras and Guatemala making its way across Mexico toward the US border raping at "levels never seen before in the history of the world" is just that, whatever Mr. Trump says it is.

So, are they raping the women in this group or are they raping Mexicans along the route of their path or are they raping each other?  And are they raping once daily, twice daily? And does their rape rate exceed that of the  Mongol hordes and Genghis Khan?  Do they rape more than the Red Army as it swept across Germany? Do they rape more than the Rwanda rapists?  Does Mr. Trump have a rape index to compare world rape numbers over the world's history?

Just consider that: Rape at levels never seen before in the world's history. It's breath-taking really. And Mr. Trump knows this.
Wow!

Who Votes?

Since the advent of the age mass communications, which Mad Dog would date to roughly to the dissemination of the radio in the early 1930's, no public figure has dominated the public consciousness in America as does our current Donald Trump.
Roosevelt had his fireside chats and Kennedy his suave press conferences, and movie stars had their faces all over Life magazine and the Rolling Stones and the Beatles were wildly popular, but for none of them did ever news broadcast begin with their names, and none of them popped up on the morning paper or on the radio the way Donald Trump now does on Twitter and Fox and CNN and virtually everywhere.


When Orwell imagined Big Brother on the TV set in the corner of every bedroom, he was predicting the Donald, but not even Orwell could imagine the ever presence of the Trump hole.


He is on every screen, all lips, and he dominates consciousness as no other modern leader. Not even Hitler, who was heavily marketed for his time, had the penetration into the every day consciousness as Trump.


There may be some very closed societies, like North Korea or one of those "Stan" countries where the personality/personage of the dear leader, the Fuhrer had the Omni presence of Trump, but for a country our size, this is new.


Every American knew who Lincoln was, but they did not think about him all the time and he chose his appearances, crafted his remarks, refined his thinking and from that we got the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural Address and some of the best writing of the 19th century--and that says something given who was writing in the 19th century (Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, among others.)


The only way we may rid ourselves of this meddlesome tyrant toddler is by voting him and his rascalions out of office. But that would require a coalescence of a disparate group, a coalition of people who vote one way primarily because they are Black, or gun control, or gay or Hispanic or labor or militant feminist or just plain fed up.  Against that is the army of white, less educated males and their female mates.


The thing about an army is it works as a unit. This is how an army of 100,000 can take control of a population ten times as large. The big group is disorganized, fractured, but the army moves as one.


Many have noted Blacks did not turn out in sufficient numbers to tip the balance to Hillary; those who voted, voted for her, but too many simply didn't bother to vote.

But look at the charts: Fact is, yes, had all Blacks got out and voted for Hillary we'd not have Donald today, but the same can be said for every other group; whites still are the majority and it's how they vote that determines elections:

And, fact is, all those kids who marched on the weekend to protest lunatic shootings at school, they don't vote much. They may threaten to vote, but they get distracted, get on Facebook, or go to the beach or do whatever adolescents do other than vote.

Until and unless folks are motivated enough to go stand on line, we'll have Trump.
Obama was different enough, and folks knew he was fighting uphill.


For now, we are toast.

Should Democrats Run on Unity, Restoring Comity and Seeking Common Ground?

Democrats have for generations tried to cobble together coalitions. Had Hillary won, it would have been with the most amazing coalition of immigrants, gays, transgenders, women, labor unionists, you name it. 

Not Interested in Reaching Across the Aisle to This Guy

All Trump needed was white, high school educated men and their wives and girlfriends. That's maybe 35-45% of the nation.

Republicans have not run on bringing us all together, we are stronger united, stronger together. They have run on "take America back" and "make America great again," which translates into, let white guys take control again and suppress everyone else.

Democrats should, I would argue, have to, run as a force not interested in compromise or reaching across the aisle or ending gridlock by being willing to talk and shift positions. That worked for Barack Obama, but that was before Trump.

Now it's simply us against them. 
We should not be interested in going to Washington to compromise in the interest of getting things moving again. 
We are only interested in overwhelming this Neo Nazi Republican party and replacing them, not talking to them.